There’s another full moon over Butler this coming week.

One of the Native American folklore names for this particular moon is the “Full Cold Moon,” which makes sense now that we’re nearly into the season of winter, at least astronomically.

It’s also known as the “Long Nights Moon” which also makes sense since night hours greatly exceed day hours, but in a few weeks the days will start getting longer again on Dec. 21.

This is also the time of year that the moon takes a really high arc across the sky from the northeast to the northwest horizon. The full moon is more or less taking the same path across the sky as the sun does during late June and early July.

And oh yes, when the moon is officially full at 6:06 p.m. Tuesday, it will once again achieve the way overblown status of “super moon,” at least according to the practice of astrologers and not the science of astronomers.

Last month the full moon could actually be considered super since it was the closest full moon to the Earth since 1948.

On Monday evening it will be just over 1,200 miles farther away from the Earth than it was last month. I will bet you anything you won’t be able tell any difference in its size, though.

Sure, the moon will appear larger when it first rises above the northeast horizon in the late afternoon, but that’s an optical illusion. By the way, I heard last month on a media outlet that super moons are really cool because they are really orange when they rise.

Hello ... the moon and sun are always varying shades of red and orange when they’re close to the horizon, an effect caused by the moon’s light piercing through the Earth’s atmosphere. The white reflected sunlight bouncing off the moon is a mixture of all the colors of the visual spectrum, or rainbow. Along the horizon, the thicker atmosphere scatters away all but the red-orange components of the reflected sunlight.

The monthly full moon is certainly one of the great treats we can enjoy in the night skies, but it honestly makes it rough on stargazers as it visually washes out all but the brighter stars.

Constellation hunting is really tough under the full moon. Unfortunately, the full moon also is really putting the kibosh on the Geminid meteor shower this week, which is one of the best displays of “shooting stars” we can see through the course of the year.

The Earth, in its orbit around the sun, is crossing into a debris field left behind by asteroid 3200 Phaethon, following its own orbit that brings it close by the sun every year and a half.

If you’re wondering if the Earth is going to be hit any time soon by Phaethon, the answer is no. Next year, however, it will pass within 6.5 million miles of Earth, and if your retirement funds hold out long enough you’ll see Phaethon pass within 2 million miles of Earth in 2093. That’s close enough. If three-mile wide Phaethon ever did hit the Earth it would not be a good day for us.

For the foreseeable future, though, we’ll just have tiny grains of dust and pebble-size pieces of Phaethon screaming into our atmosphere at around 80,000 mph and burning up due to air friction.

The streaks of light we call meteors are not caused by the incineration of the debris 60 to 80 miles above the ground, but by the temporary destabilizing of the column of air these particles are ripping through. Unfortunately, this week the moonlight won’t feel right when you’re trying your hand at meteor watching. Most of the streaks of light will be overwhelmed by lunar light.

There will be two super bright “stars” in the early evening southwestern sky that the moonlight won’t be able to blot out — the planets Venus and Mars.

The planet named after the Roman goddess of love is the far brighter of the two. You just can’t miss Venus as it pops out in the southwest. It is extremely bright.

Mars is the next brightest starlike object you can see, just to the upper left of Venus. It’s not nearly as bright but sports a distinctive reddish hue.

Neither planet is a very good telescope target. Venus is only 88 million miles from Earth, but it’s completely covered by an extremely reflective and poisonous cloud deck mainly made of carbon dioxide. Acid rain falls out of those clouds.

The only really interesting thing about viewing Venus with a telescope is that it goes through phases just like our moon. This happens because Venus’s orbit around the sun lies within Earth’s orbit around our home star. Right now. Venus looks like a bright football, just like the gibbous moon.

Despite its brightness, Mars is also a lousy telescope target, mainly because it’s so far away right now and is such a small planet, only about half of the diameter of the Earth.

About all you see when you view Mars through even a larger amateur telescope is a red dot. About every two years Mars gets really close to the Earth, and then it’s a much more alluring target.

Because of Mars’s and Venus’s respective orbits around the sun, they lie nearly in the same plane along with our own Earth’s orbit.

Mars and Venus will be getting fairly close to each other in the sky next month. Remember the book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus?”

Well, the guys and gals will be having a celestial faceoff in early 2017.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/Paul and is author of the book, “Stars; a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations” which is published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at http://www.adventurepublications.net